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7301

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows "safely remove device" thingie

« Last post by f0dder on April 15, 2007, 08:54 AM »

Welcome aboard, ianmcc!

Maybe I am just being lucky, but having worked in this manner for over 3 years, I am still to be covinced that the "safely remove device" option is really necessary.

Yeah, you've been lucky

Your devices are probably set to "optimize for quick removal" (I think this is the default - at least I've usually had to set mine to "optimize for performance"). Also, if you unplug your device after there hasn't been disk access "for a bit", you're usually safe.

I still recommend using the safely remove hardware icon, though. One day you'll be unplugging a device at the wrong time, and that's not going to be nice. But okay, NTFS is pretty robust, so you'll most likely only lose the last few files you've been writing to, and filesystem metadata corruption can probably be repaired.

Sucks if the file destroyed is, say, the track database on an iPod.

7302

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows "safely remove device" thingie

« Last post by f0dder on April 14, 2007, 12:46 PM »

I should think so...

but when you need to do this "semi-forceful" removal, do run sysinternals' sync.exe. Shouldn't really be necessary when you do suspend/standby/whatever, I'm pretty sure windows does flush it's filesystem cache when you do that, but it doesn't hurt playing it as safe as you can.

7303

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows "safely remove device" thingie

« Last post by f0dder on April 14, 2007, 11:32 AM »

Well, if you shut down your computer it's safe... I assume it's the same with hibernate.

7304

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows "safely remove device" thingie

« Last post by f0dder on April 14, 2007, 08:08 AM »

I think the issue is that card readers are seen as a removable drive - think floppy drive, zip drive, etc. You don't want to "unplug the drive", you want to "eject the disk".

7305

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: easm - The Win32 Assembler

« Last post by f0dder on April 13, 2007, 04:57 PM »

I like the ability to do imports that way instead of relying on import libraries. Do you only support PE executable output, or can you produce coff .obj files as well? And, in the case that you only produce PEs, do you support static libraries?

Imho "cui" should be renamed "console", it's more standard and less prone to be confused with "gui".

Do you plan on supporting structures? Otherwise win32 development will be prettttty tedious. And since that's your declared aim, well... yeah. You'd probably also want to support some of the existing includes (or create/convert yourself), having to list constants/structs in each source module is bad.

Keep up the good work though, always interesting to see yet another assembler (and no, I don't mean YASM ).

Oh, and you should step by the http://asmcommunity.net/ forum and make a post about it

7306

General Software Discussion / Re: I Don't Want To Recode The Wheel

« Last post by f0dder on April 13, 2007, 04:48 PM »

Ugh, shared network files? Get ready for a lot of headache >_<

I don't know any apps that will do exactly what you want off top of my head, since you have more requirements than just copying... otherwise Microsoft's RoboCopy might have done the trick (seems to be pretty robust).

Shouldn't be a too bad coding task anyway, apart from the shared bit. If that means that the files on the SMB server might be in the process of being written while the client wants to transfer.

7307

Living Room / Re: Why Linux is better

« Last post by f0dder on April 13, 2007, 04:45 PM »

I see some of the reasons why I think that page sucks have already been addressed, but I'll write my thoughts on it when I get a little time to sit down and write something proper.

7308

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows "safely remove device" thingie

« Last post by f0dder on April 13, 2007, 04:43 PM »

Also, if you get the "device busy, cannot unmount" error, try using the handle tool from sysinternals - it will often show you which program is the sinner. Doesn't always work though, which puzzles me; I'd really like to know what has the device locked in those situations.

7309

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows "safely remove device" thingie

« Last post by f0dder on April 13, 2007, 07:40 AM »

I use it when I need to remove a device, all the time, period. If you don't do this, you risk filesystem cache not being flushed, device not being unmounted cleanly, and filesystem corruption as a result. If you have your devices set as "optimize for quick removal" (which means slow speed) the risk of damage is a lot smaller, but you'll suffer from bad speed.

And yeah, sometimes the device will be in use even though it appearantly makes no sense... even an application having it's "current working directory" set to a location on the external disk will cause this, no files have to be open.

7310

General Software Discussion / Re: Source Insight IDE: it seems to be different, and better!

« Last post by f0dder on April 13, 2007, 07:31 AM »

Hm, bother!

The browse database is a really useful feature once you learn it, I'm quite surprised they haven't included it for dotNET :-s

7311

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: TOOL fans unite

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 08:13 PM »

Pretty soon I'll have a BOIL album to spare - can send it to the first bidder that's willing to pay shipping cost from Denmark.

Not sure what to think of NIN's newest... the couple tracks they played live last friday ( ) seemed fine enough, but I'm not to fond of "your god is dead and noone cares" morphing into "may god have mercy on our dirty little hearts". But we'll see.

7312

General Software Discussion / Re: Source Insight IDE: it seems to be different, and better!

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 05:20 PM »

MrCrispy: if you're usually using Visual Studio, check out it's "browse database" stuff (dunno if it's available for C#, but I should thing so) - pretty powerful stuff.

7313

General Software Discussion / Re: System Safety Monitor

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 05:13 PM »

to remember -

1. most decent anti-virus programs detect malware

-MrCrispy (April 12, 2007, 03:45 PM)

Outright wrong!

-Curt (April 12, 2007, 05:02 PM)

Perheps you missed the word decent in there?

And heh, from that "interview" I'd label the guy as a script kiddie and not a hacker. Wonder what his company affiliations are anyway... perhaps the company behind SSM?

7314

General Software Discussion / Re: Sumatra PDF Viewer is cool, thin, and open-source

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 09:52 AM »

I can spare $20 in DonationCredits, this seems like a worthy cause...

7315

Developer's Corner / Re: Source code colors: Contrast / Readability / Ergonomics

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 08:19 AM »

Good old Turbo Pascal - I started my venturing into programming with TP6. Borland had the greatest IDEs back then, the integrated help was outstanding, and TP6's ability to "compile & link to RAM" was _perfect_ when working on a dead-slow 286 with an even slower harddrive (and yeah, I had a damn lot of green-on-blue as well, you sorta needed that to get acceptable speeds back then).

I'm still stuck with a black-on-white scheme (with additional syntax highlighting - I wouldn't live without that today!), it works well enough and I don't get eyestrain. Been meaning to try out something else, but it just takes too long to fiddle with (Notepad++ doesn't come with schemes to choose from). Green-on-black has always seemed very harsh to me.

In VIM I use the 'desert' scheme, which is pretty nice... but VIM is never going to be my main editor, I'm afraid. It's slightly (and I do mean slightly, but enough to notice) heavier than Notepad++, and I don't really do stuff faster in it. Great when I'm stuck on linux, though.

7316

General Software Discussion / Re: Sumatra PDF Viewer is cool, thin, and open-source

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 08:04 AM »

Okay, just gave Sumatra a quick test drive.

#1 - rendering. Unfortunately I don't have any of those "really heavy" PDFs lying around, but it seems to do quite well. Also, while foxit seems to "render as you go" (causing flickering), Sumatra seems to render a full page offscreen before drawing - smooth. On the other hand, it's noticeably slower at displaying the S.T.A.L.K.E.R user manual... slow jpeg decompression, perhaps?

#2 - memory usage. 32meg pdf, Tanenbaum's Distributed Operating Systems. Foxit Reader uses ~4meg private bytes, Sumatra uses ~10meg private bytes. Nothing to worry about, imho. Also, if opening multiple PDFs, you get multiple instances of Foxit, but only one instance of Sumatra.

#3 - stability. I managed to crash Sumatra by having a bunch of PDFs open and paging back and forth in one of Intel's systems manuals... don't think I've seen Foxit crash yet.

Sumatra seems promising though, and it's nice that it's opensource. Might even be worth to dig in myself and run a little profiling on it...

7317

General Software Discussion / Re: Sumatra PDF Viewer is cool, thin, and open-source

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 07:43 AM »

Hm, no copy function will make it a no-go

But I'll check it out anyway. Foxit is very nice, but is dog slow when rendering more complex PDFs. Additionaly memory usage of Sumatra doesn't bother me much, unless it's a linear (or worse ) function of the size of the pdf.

The AR speedup thing is nice, but last time I tried it, it was still noticably slower than foxit...

7318

General Software Discussion / Re: Which Software MP3 Encoder already supports DualCore Cpus?

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 07:39 AM »

Visit dbpoweramp.com , click the 'music converter', click 'reference'. It's the "big version" of their music converter, check the feature comparison. Ultra Secure and C2 Pointers is what makes it so sekxzy.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like you can register reference without getting the mp3 pack, but oh well

7319

Living Room / Re: Been asked a MILLION times...Internet explorer

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 07:35 AM »

Adaware is pretty junk, for one they lie about the amount of junkware they detect - Spybot, as 2stepsback recommends, is better.

If you haven't done so already, make sure the XP computer is running SP2, and enable the firewall. That's really all you need to prevent the automated "sweep attacks" that are continuously run on the internet.

While you're not going to use IE to browse the web etc., do try to just start it, perhaps visit google.com, to see if you also get the popups using that. And know that you can't remove IE from your system, the farthest you can go is removing iexplore.exe... which is just a very thin wrapper around the IE components. If you remove those, lots of software will break.

7320

General Software Discussion / Re: The End of Support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and 1a

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 07:30 AM »

Imho there's not much reason not to upgrade to SP2 if you're running XP - unless you have the really minimal amount of hardware required to run XP, in which case you'd be better off running win2k.

The single biggest reason for sticking to 9x I've seen, has been app's #4 - which I'll arrogantly name "ignorance"

7321

Living Room / Re: firefox inside firefox

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 07:25 AM »

Hehe, that seems like a pretty insane thing to do

7322

General Software Discussion / Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware

« Last post by f0dder on April 12, 2007, 07:20 AM »

Yes, I know WinFS was supposed to be more than just searching, and I'm still glad they removed it - I don't like the overhead it would have introduced, the amount of bugs that would inevitably be present, nor the increased "scatter files all over" mentality it would bring.

Managing users, data, backups is already bad enough as it is, and WinFS wouldn't make it any better... and I still claim that for a lot of people, a desktop search (as an addon, please, not a stuffed-down-your-troath forced integral part of the OS) would be just fine.

But I know, I'm pretty conservative on some regards, and I'm a control freak.

7323

Living Room / Re: BaboViolent 2: Another great top-down fast free multiplayer shooter!

« Last post by f0dder on April 11, 2007, 06:50 PM »

Hm, remind me to look at this tomorrow

7324

Living Room / Re: Flow-inspired game: Bubble Tanks

« Last post by f0dder on April 11, 2007, 06:48 PM »

I went down and to the right, hit end of the world both down and right

7325

General Software Discussion / Re: Don't be fooled, Vista wants new hardware

« Last post by f0dder on April 11, 2007, 06:46 PM »

Oh I understand a little better now. Not being a programmer I don't know about these things...

-Hirudin (April 11, 2007, 02:16 PM)

And normal users won't know about this (and most wouldn't care if they knew), just like most won't care about the DRM ("I don't watch hd/bluray on my computer"). Problem is, that makes it even easier to get this technology sneaked in and locked down even tighter. And they're trying to market TPM as if it was for our convenience/safety, *sigh*.